AZ, what you said applies to all stages.
So why do people say it does (aka "Brinstar and Rainbow change the game")? Do I really need to pick through 800 posts in this thread to show how the argument keeps popping up?
I think stages that have the least amount of moving parts and possess some form of symmetry do the best job of providing a player vs player competitive atmosphere, which to me is a better form off competition than player + stage vs player + stage.
Play street fighter then. Smash is inherently player + stage.
so clearly the definition of a banned stage is more complicated than you or AZ are indicating.
In both Melee or Brawl, a banned stage is simply whatever the TO's agree to ban. There really is no logical criteria - as much as many try to justify actions post-ban.
AZ says something absolutely ****ing
********, gets rebutted, and now is yet to be seen.
It doesn't make much sense to respond after every post in a thread when I can wait a day or two and do it all at once. More importantly, your impression of being "rebutted" is quite hilarious. These are the same arguments that have been getting made for the past 5-6 years.
A poll would be nice... but at the end of the day all that matter is if tournament organizers want to ban the stages at the event.
This.
Neutral stages are the most fair across the board in the sense that they have almost no influence on the conflicts.
We realized quite quickly (like 2003/4) that there was no such thing as a "neutral" stage. It was to late to change the lingo though and now there are to many people (like you) who actually believe there is something intrinsically neutral about stages like Final Destination - when it is clear an extremely flat stage can add as much imbalance to a match as a stage with hazards like Brinstar.
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Really the stage debate is basically a debate between
norm and other. Stages that are flat or maybe just have some platforms and minimal obstructing elements are only seen as the norm/"neutral" because that is how its been perceived in the community for well over 6 or 7 years. The reality is if we had started playing this game with the flat stages in the Counterpick section, and the stages with hazards/odd slopes/etc in the "neutral" section, then the entire approach to the game would have been different.
On another note, way to many people forget that the entire point of advance slob picks is to allow you to change characters to avoid bad stages. To many people instead think they should be allowed to stay the same character regardless of stage weaknesses, and instead they want the stage banned because they don't want to learn another character. If you don't like fighting Jiggly or Peach on Mute, you could always have switched off Fox and gone one of those two characters, after all.
Again though, most of this is meaningless, if the TO's got together tomorrow they could decide to only use one stage for an entire tournament - they don't need logical or legitimate justification for banning things, and indeed they haven't really had this for several years. It became increasingly hard to explain to people why stages were banned starting in about late 2006.
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Really, it's all preference. It shouldn't be, but it is.
